Jane Margaret Byrne (née Burke; May 24, 1933 – November 14, 2014) was an American politician who served as the 50th mayor of Chicago from April 16, 1979, until April 29, 1983. Prior to her tenure as mayor, Byrne served as Chicago's commissioner of consumer sales from 1969 until 1977 under Mayor Richard J. Daley, the only woman in the mayoral cabinet.
Byrne won the 1979 Chicago mayoral election on April 3, 1979 becoming the first female mayor of the city, and causing an upheaval in beating the city's political machine. She was the first woman to be elected mayor of a major city in the United States, as Chicago was the second largest city in the United States at the time.
Byrne narrowly lost her bid for renomination in the Democratic primary for the 1983 Chicago mayoral election, in which she faced a long-expected challenge from Richard J. Daley's son Richard M. Daley, with both Byrne and Daley losing to Harold Washington in an upset. Washington won the general election. Byrne unsuccessfully challenged Washington for the nomination in 1987, but endorsed his re-election in the general election. Byrne made one last unsuccessful bid for the Democratic mayoral nomination in 1991, challenging Richard M. Daley (who had become mayor in a special election two years earlier).
Byrne was born Jane Margaret Burke on May 24, 1933, at John B. Murphy Hospital in the Lake View neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, Illinois, to Katherine Marie Burke (née Nolan), a housewife, and William Patrick Burke, vice president of Inland Steel. Raised on the city's north side, Byrne graduated from Saint Scholastica High School and attended Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College for her first year of college. Byrne later transferred to Barat College, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology in 1955.
Byrne entered politics to volunteer in John F. Kennedy's campaign for president in 1960. During that campaign she first met then Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. After Daley met Byrne, he appointed her to several positions, beginning in 1964 with a job in a city anti-poverty program In June 1965, she was promoted to working with the Chicago Committee of Urban Opportunity.
In 1968, Byrne was appointed head of the City of Chicago's consumer affairs department. She served as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and chairperson of the DNC resolutions committee in 1973. In 1975, Byrne was appointed co-chairperson of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee by Daley, over the objection of a majority of Democratic leaders. The committee ousted Byrne shortly after Daley's death in late 1976. Shortly thereafter, Byrne accused the newly appointed mayor Michael Bilandic of being unfair to citizens of the city by approving an increase in regulated taxi fares, which Byrne charged was the result of a "backroom deal". Byrne was then dismissed from her post as head of consumer affairs by Bilandic.
Months after being fired as head of the consumer affairs department, Byrne challenged Bilandic in the 1979 Democratic mayoral primary, the real contest in the heavily Democratic Chicago. Officially announcing her mayoral campaign in August 1977, Byrne partnered with Chicago journalist and political consultant Don Rose, who served as her campaign manager. At first, political observers believed she had little chance of winning. A memorandum inside the Bilandic campaign said it should portray her as "a shrill, charging, vindictive person—and nothing makes a woman look worse".
Nevertheless, the January Chicago Blizzard of 1979 paralyzed the city and caused Bilandic to be seen as an ineffective leader. Bilandic's ineffective leadership caused Jesse Jackson to endorse Byrne. Even many Republican voters voted in the Democratic primary to help beat Bilandic. Infuriated voters on the North Side and Northwest Side retaliated against Bilandic for the Democratic Party's slating of only South Side candidates for the mayor, clerk, and treasurer (the outgoing city clerk, John C. Marcin, was from the Northwest Side). These four factors combined to give Byrne a 51% to 49% victory over Bilandic in the primary. Byrne outperformed Bilandic in more than half of wards. She performed particularly strongly in Black-majority wards, which she swept.
Positioning herself as a reformer, Byrne won the general election with 82.1% of the vote, which remains the largest vote share any candidate has won in a Chicago mayoral election.
While Byrne had run against the Democratic political machine's candidate (Bilandic) in the primary, and her win over him harmed the machine's reputation for electoral strength, she had not run on any promise of eliminating the machine once mayor. The New York Times noted shortly after her primary election victory of Bilandic, Despite the threat her victory posed to the reputation and perhaps even the continued existence of the machine, which has controlled City Hall since 1931, Mrs. Byrne, a loyal disciple of Mayor Daley, has shown little appetite for dismantling the organization he proudly headed for two decades.
Leadership and general politics
Byrne made inclusive moves as mayor such as shepherding the hiring of the city's first African-American and female school superintendent Ruth B. Love, and she was the first mayor to recognize the gay community. Byrne helped to make Chicago more welcoming to the gay community. She ended the police department's practice of raiding gay bars, and declared the city's first official "Gay Pride Parade Day" in 1981. However, during her tenure, Byrne drifted away from many of the progressive tenets she had campaigned on. Byrne began to collaborate with aldermen Edward M. Burke and Edward Vrdolyak, whom, during her 1979 campaign, she had denounced as an "evil cabal".
In 1982, she supported the Cook County Democratic Party's replacement of its chairman, County Board President George Dunne, with her city council ally, Alderman Edward Vrdolyak.
Byrne and the Cook County Democratic Party endorsed Senator Ted Kennedy for president in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, but incumbent President Jimmy Carter won the Illinois Democratic Primary and even carried Cook County and the city of Chicago. Byrne's endorsement of Kennedy was later considered detrimental because of her controversial tenure, and Kennedy's loss in the city was a key moment in the 1980 Democratic Party presidential primaries because of Chicago's role in delivering his brother John F. Kennedy the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. When Byrne and Kennedy walked in the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade they were sometimes booed by hecklers.
Simultaneously, Byrne and the Cook County Democratic Party's candidate in the 1980 election for Cook County State's Attorney (chief local prosecutor), 14th Ward Alderman Edward M. Burke, lost in the Democratic primary to Richard M. Daley, and Daley then unseated GOP incumbent Bernard Carey in the general election.
The Chicago Sun Times reported that Byrne's enemies publicly mocked her as "that crazy broad" and "that skinny bitch" and worse.
In her first year in office, significant instances of turnover in prominent city positions led critics to accuse Byrne of running a "revolving door administration".
While Byrne initially made inclusive moves with regards to appointments as mayor: shepherding the hiring of the city's first African-American and female school superintendent Ruth B. Love which she later pivoted away from this. Among the later steps that Byrne took that upset many of the progressives and Blacks that had supported her in the 1979 mayoral campaign was replacing Black members of the Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Housing Authority board with White members, some of whom even held stances that critics viewed as racist.